Sciences, Philosophie, Histoire – UMR 7219, laboratoire SPHERE

This seminar is organized around a presentation of a primary source and the problems it raises, followed by a reading of this published and translated source. A session of the seminar can last up to 3 hours, and is conducted by experienced researchers, doctoral students or even master’s students.

This seminar has a declension in the form of the cuneiform text reading seminar for those interested in cuneiform writing.


PROGRAM 2019-2020

On Mondays, 2pm – 5pm, Room Gris, 734A,
University Paris Diderot, Building Condorcet, 4, rue Elsa Morante, 75013 Paris *

2019/10/7

• Karine Chemla (CNRS, SPHere)
  Fondamental figures

11/4, 1:30 – 5:30pm

• Guillaume Toucas (SPHERE)
  Late babylonian mathematical procedure texts

• Guillaume Loizelet (Université de Paris (Diderot), SPHERE, & Université de Toulouse)
  Problèmes des Spheres chez Ptolémée et al-Biruni

2020/ 1/ 6, !! session cancelled !!!

• Camille Lecompte (ArScAn-VEPMO)
  Calculer des surfaces aux époques archaïques (Mésopotamie, 4e et 3e millénaires avant l’ère commune) : des exemples tirés de tablettes de Jemdet-Nasr, Umma, Fara, Girsu et autres provenances inconnues

2/3, !! session cancelled !!!

• Hasan Amini (University of Téhéran)
  A delicate method for the calculation of π in an anonymous 15th century text in Arabic
  In the history of mathematics, π as a special number and an important ratio has been calculated by various mathematical methods, invented to produce a better approximation. Al-Kāshī, a Persian astronomer and mathematician of the 14-15th century, is mostly known for his calculation of π correctly to 9 sexagesimal digits. In this reading/seminar,, we will decipher and study an abridged Arabic mathematical text, which is devoted to a different method to compute π. This anonymous text from the 15th century, referring to al-Kāshī, evidently is supplementary to his work, presenting a method with two different approximations for the computation of π.

3/2, !! session cancelled !!!

• Alexei Volkov. (National Tsing Hua University)
  Mathematical Treatises from Dunhuang

18/5, 2:00pm–4:00pm, session online

• Alexis Trouillot
  "Correcting" in the commentary of the chapter on inheritance of the Mukhta?ar Khal?l by the 19th century Saharan scholar Sidiyy? al-Kab?r

15/6, session online

• Adeline Reynaud (Univ. Paris Diderot, SPHERE)
  Variations entre les procédures, variations entre les formulations, variations entre les diagrammes dans la collection de problèmes paléo-babylonienne MS 3052